Waldo Lydecker: Laura considered me the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting man she'd ever met. I was in complete accord wi...th her on that point.... She thought me also the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.Detective Mark McPherson: Did you agree with her there, too?Waldo Lydecker: McPherson, you won't understand this, but I've tried to become the kindest, gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.Detective Mark McPherson: Have any luck?Waldo Lydecker: Let me put it this way: I shall be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Three characteristics mark all confirmed expatriates: (1) slowness on the up-take, (2) the tendency to personalize the impersonal-...-interpreting in terms of politeness or of policy what should be kept clearly in terms of ideas, (3) the tendency to orientalize one's attitude toward women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptions... empirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Our discussion will be adequate; if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of; for precision is not to be sought fo...r alike in all discussions, and more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, exhibit much variety and fluctuation, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also exhibit a similar fluctuation.... We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises, to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.... In the same spirit, therefore, should each of our statements be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »